Entertainment

Livestar Puts Recommendations From Friends, Strangers and Critics in One Place

Yelp, a newspaper's entertainment section, Foursquare and Facebook all offer different approaches to pinning down your next leisure activity. A new startup aims to put all four approaches into one app.

Livestar is a free iOS app that lets users search for restaurants, movies and music within a set distance. Then, they can get feedback on the results by toggling between what critics, their friends and review sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon have said about the venue. They can filter results by specific friends or sources and the ones they like to a "trusted" filter.

"We're trying to build Facebook for recommendations," says founder Fritz Lanman, a first-time entrepreneur who is also an investor in Pinterest and Square.

The app also has a Q&A component so users can ask specific Facebook friends for recommendations. Livestar pre-populates a list of likely answers. If, for instance, a user asks for "Italian restaurants in Midtown," the app will include a list of restaurants that meet that description in the message. Making answers easy to write should also make them more likely.

Livestar has company in the real-time review space, including a handful of live Q&A and preemptive check-in apps. Offering trusted reviews puts a service in position to, like Google Search, influence consumers as they're making decisions. Lanman calls the potential to monetize Livestar "the next generation direct-response advertising model."

What sets his app apart is that it doesn't rely on one source — reviews, strangers, friends or location-based recommendations — for real-time reviews, but all of them.

Is that enough of a difference to make it your go-to recommendation engine? Or will you stick to using some of its sources, such as Yelp, Urbanspoon, review pages and Facebook friends, instead?

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